Meter devices can be used to measure the amount of fluid flow through a conduit, such as residential, commercial or industrial gas loads that are delivered through a system of gas lines. For example, some meter devices are used in natural gas flow systems to measure the amount of natural gas transmitted from a producer, transmitted from a distributor, or transmitted to a user. Such meter measurements can be tabulated for purposes of billing consumers of the natural gas.
In some circumstances, one or more instruments can be mounted to a meter device to display, store, or transmit information related to the meter device. For example, some gas meters may include remote reader instruments that can transmit data regarding the gas flow (measured values or corrected values) to a service provider. Such remote reader instruments may tabulate the accumulation of electrical pulses produced by the instrument and then correlate the electrical pulses to a volume of fluid that passes through the meter device.
Some instruments that are mounted to a meter device are driven by energy generated from the fluid flow through the meter device. For example, a rotary positive displacement gas meter may employ impellers that rotate in response to gas being directed from a conduit to the meter to act upon the impellers. The rotation of the impellers can be translated to rotation of a drive shaft, which is used to drive the instruments. If, however, the meter is connected to the conduit so that fluid flows through the meter in an opposite direction, the rotation of the impellers (and the rotation of the drive shaft) may be reversed. Because the instruments mounted to the flow meter are driven by the drive shaft, the reverse rotation of the drive shaft may affect the operation of the instruments. For example, a typical corrector instrument that includes a counter may count upward when the fluid flows through the meter in a particular direction, but may count in reverse if the meter is connected to the conduit so that fluid flows therethrough in the opposite direction.
To account for the flow direction through the meter and the resulting rotational direction of the drive shaft, a field technician may be required to partially disassemble the instrument and manually adjust one or more gears inside the instrument's drive train before installing the instrument to the meter device. Such a manual adjustment of the gears inside the instrument can be time consuming and complex, especially when the instrument is being installed in harsh ambient conditions (e.g., cold outdoor conditions, hot ambient temperatures near a burner, or the like).
Alternatively, a technician may remove the meter itself from its conduit, physically turn the meter around, and then reinstall the meter to thereby reverse the input and output ends to reverse the rotation of the drive shaft. Or, a technician may reconfigure the conduit to reverse the follow through the meter and thereby reverse the rotation of the drive shaft. Such manual reconfigurations of the conduit or the meter can be time consuming and complex and may even require pressure testing of connections.